May 2018 Pediatrics

Each month, we hand-search 87 top journals in pediatric speech–language pathology for the newest articles relevant to Pediatric SLPs. From a stack of 100+ articles per month, we narrow it down to those immediately applicable to clinical practice, and review them here! Read more about our process here.

So, you’re an awesome clinician who is eliciting and analyzing a language sample from a bilingual preschooler. High five for you! You want to capture some data about their grammar skills. What exactly do you measure? The authors of this study suggest that, rather than counting up how accurate the child’s use of tense and agreement markers is (so, finding the percentage of accurate uses out of total obligatory contexts), you instead focus on the diversity and productivity of tense/agreement markers...

Did you ever add a child to your caseload and think, “Why haven’t I seen this kid sooner?!” You’re not alone. Underidentification of developmental language disorder in young children is a major issue. So, how can we deal with this? One way is to identify good screening tools. Previous research shows...

In the last review, we shared research on a potentially valid tool to screen Mainstream English-speaking kindergarteners for language disorders. But what about our kiddos who speak other dialects of English, like African American English (AAE) or Southern White English (SWE)? In this study...

The authors of this study interviewed school-based SLPs across the United States about how we choose assessment tools and diagnose/qualify our students. They wanted to understand not just which tools we use, but why we choose them, what “rules” we follow when we make diagnostic decisions, and what external factors affect those decisions...

We often hear about the benefits of bilingualism, but we can’t overlook the challenges it can bring. Some children begin learning a second language (L2), while their first (L1) is still developing. As early as preschool, these children—called dual language learners (DLLs)—can fall behind their monolingual peers in important areas, including vocabulary development. In order to ensure that this lag doesn’t continue, it’s crucial to provide effective vocabulary instruction as early as possible...

We know that bilingual children’s vocabulary predicts long-term literacy outcomes. In this study, teachers taught higher-level English words (e.g., illness, clung, fierce) through storybook reading activities to low-income second graders* who spoke Spanish at home. The complete word lists, books used, and an example lesson are in the article’s supplemental materials. Each word was taught by one of three methods...

It’s hard to imagine going through a day without either telling or hearing a story. “What’d you do this weekend? What was the movie about? What happened?!” We don’t think twice when answering these questions. For some kids, though, this can be really difficult. As the authors of this study point out...

Unfortunate but true:Despite the advances our field has seen in AAC awareness, knowledge, and technologies, too many children with complex communication needs remain “emergent” or “pre-symbolic” communicators into adolescence and beyond. Older beginning communicators encounter huge restrictions to their participation across environments. There are lots of reasons for this, and many individual factors at play, but it’s definitely a problem...

Sometimes the popularity of a treatment program doesn’t match the evidence supporting it. Enter the Kaufman Speech to Language Protocol (K-SLP) for treating children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS;aka: Kaufman cards, Kaufman kit) which the authors of this study point out, “is a treatment program that, anecdotally, is widely used by clinicians despite the lack of theory to support the approach.”

The use of telegraphic speech with children who have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), by both parents and clinicians, is common. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does it affect language development? In this study, the aim to figure this out...